g, quiet,
stagnant, cunning perhaps, quite un-enterprising; they lived in
the valley of the Hoangho, and had not discovered, or had
forgotten, the Yangtse to the south of them, and the sea to the
east. They might have their local loyalties and patriotism of the
pork-barrel, and a certain arrogance of race: belief in
the essential superiority of the Black-haired People to the
barbarians on their borders; but no high feeling for Chu Hia--
All the Chinas;--no dream of a possible national union and
greatness. Some three hundred of their folk-ballads come down to
us, which are as unlike the folk-ballads of Europe as may be.
They do not touch on the supernatural; display no imagination;
there are no ghosts or fairies; there is no glory or delight in
war; there is no glory in anything;--but only an intense
desirability in _home,_--in staying at home with your family, and
doing your I work in the fields. And nothing of what we should
call romance, even in this home-love: the chief tie is that
between parents and children, not that between husband and wife,
and still less that between lovers. There is much moralizing and
wistful sadness.--Such was the life of the peasants; at the
other pole was the life of the courts: intrigue and cunning, and
what always goes with cunning--ineptitude; a good measure of
debauchery; some finicking unimportant refinement; each man for
self and party, and none for Gods and Men. We have to do, not
with the bright colors of the childhood of a race, but with the
grayness of its extreme old age. Those who will may argue that
you can have old age with never a prime, youth, or childhood
behind it. Some say that Laotse was born at sixty-one, or
seventy, or eighty-two years old--a few decades more or less are
not worth bothering about--whence his name _lao tse,_ the _old
son_ (but _tse_ may also mean Teacher or Philosopher). But I
misdoubt the accuracy of such accounts, myself. I think it likely
he was a baby to begin with, like the majority of us. And I
imagine his country had been young, too, before she grew old;--as
young as America, and as vigorous.

------
* _Chinese Literature:_ Giles;--whence also much else in
these articles.
------

Among such a people, how much should you expect to find of the
Sacred Mysteries?--There were the Nine Tripods of Ta Yu with the
king at Honanfu, to say that his kinghood had behind it symbolic
sanctions; there was the Book of Changes; there was the system
of